Is your website ready for Christmas?

Sep 3, 2018

Start planning your online Christmas and New Year strategy as early as possible to maximise potential to reach your customers and reap the benefit of lead generation. For many businesses, the Christmas period is a prime time for consumer acquisition and conversion. Now is the perfect time to refresh your online presence and consider your Google positioning (Search Engine Optimisation i.e. SEO), to ensure your target audience gets to hear about your great Christmas offers and services.

A lot of the marketing strategy for this festive period happens well in advance and many businesses create specific seasonal campaigns to increase their profitability during this time of the year. A lot of planning and effort is put into considering marketing material, seasonal events, social media and email campaigns. However, businesses often forget about their organic website traffic, unable to see the importance of Christmas based keywords, and how by focusing on an organic strategy can enhance profits and introduce new target markets to businesses at this key consumer time. This strategy also gives any business a sound start to generating leads in the New Year.

Timing is key and even if businesses are aware of seasonal SEO keywords and want to create additional web pages/blog posts around these terms, waiting until November is too late. It is common that search engines will not properly rank pages straight away. That is why it is best to plan ahead at least 2-4 months for SEO i.e. Google ranking, around Christmas keywords to make sure that you gain visibility in the search engine.

Christmas keywords are words that increase in demand around this time of year and are usually created around search terms customers type into search engines such as Google. The most common type of keywords searched for around these times are ones that are based on “gifting keywords” and gender based/family members (i.e. Christmas gift ideas for dad), also this can be branched out into service providers and co-workers. Also keywords that are more relevant around this time are “price” derived keywords for stocking fillers, and secret Santa (i.e. gifts for under £25).

A successful online Christmas marketing strategy should encompass:

Website back end refresh to ensure web code and plug ins are up to date enabling your website to work efficiently and swiftly

Website updated with fresh images and content. People tend to think their decision-making is purely rational, but the truth is all people make decisions emotionally before justifying them rationally. As a result, a successful Christmas marketing campaign should be an emotional one. Focus on the feelings that fit the season, including friendship, “home for Christmas,” good will, giving back and gratitude.